The Stratification of Socialization Processes: A View from the Classroom.

Natriello, Gary; Dornbusch, Sanford M.

In this study, teachers were asked to complete questionnaires designed to determine how they handle 16 typical classroom problems concerning students' failures to conform to the academic achievement or social behavior norms of the school. In one form of the questionnaire, 156 teachers from 14 schools were presented with hypothetical profiles of student's ethnicity, sex, academic achievement record, and social behavior record. After reading the classroom problems and student profiles, teachers explained how they would respond to the problems, either by presenting to students standards of behavior and/or warmth. "Presentation of standards" refers to expectations, evaluations, and judgments made about both academic performance and behavior. "Warmth" means "expressions of personal concern." In the second form of the questionnaire, 168 teachers in 18 schools were presented with typical classroom problems and asked to select students at random from their roll books and to associate each with one of the specific classroom problems. Teachers were asked how they would respond in terms of warmth and presentation of standards if these students failed to conform to a random selected school norm. It was hypothesized that teachers would be less warm and offer more standards to students with good behavior and high academic achievement and to students with poor behavior and high academic achievement teachers would respond with more warmth and less presentations of standards. The initial findings did not support the hypothesis. Among the findings are that teachers presented more standards to students with discrepant performance characteristics than to those with congruent performance characteristics. (AM)